This section focuses on adding personality and story to one’s animations. People, animals, and main characters are always thinking about something, even if they’re not doing much. What is their state of mind Happy Sad Scared. . . Age Toddler Teen Middle aged Old A character’s age will affect their posture, movement, and characteristics like clumsiness. Also, gender, muscular versus lean, tall and skinny versus short and squat will affect their animation too.

Blocking This is the most important step to get right It gets all the timing right and gets all your poses down - about one key every 4th frame Stepped Blocking Constant interpolation Great for most shots - snappy and easy to understand Splocking Bezier Curves Good for subtle movements and broad camera moves For example, a character just standing there and making subtle facial expression changes Not recommended for beginners as it’s floaty and difficult to read Might be okay for camera motion as it may be needed to keep character in frame Splining Bezier or linear interpolation Fixes issues not visible in blocking Adjust timing Cleanup motion curves Push spacing and add eases Detailed lipsync work Getting the shot close to final TIP: After fixing big issues, work section by section or controller by controller Working from frames one to X, then X to Y Working from one body part to the next Polish Final cleanup stage Push the poses, add fine details and fleshiness to the face and connectivity to the body Offsetting twinning animatioons (Fingers, eye blinks) Fixing intersections DO NOT make major changes in the polish stage Tedius frame by frame work The level of polish depends on one’s experience Tip: Get someone with more experience than you to look at your work because they can see stuff you’ve missed.

Keys One of the easiest ways to think of story boarding is to verbally describe the action in a scene. For instance, a man enters the coffee shop, he orders coffee and a cold croissant. He waits for the cashier to give him his croissant, then goes to unpack his stuff at the counter spot he’s going to sit at. He takes out his laptop, removes the laptop from its case, returns the laptop to the bag, takes out the plugs, headphones, and mouse.

Both timing and spacing are aspects of speed. Timing Timing is measured in frames. 24fps is the industry standard for animation in films and T.V. The more frames between keys in an animation, the slower the action. Spacing Spacing determines how the animation gets from one key to the next. Beyond just linear and curve, with a bezier one can describe how quickly an object accelerates.

Preparing the Reference Image Start by removing any background The Magic Select tool in the Gimp is reasonable at this Then take the erase brush and clean up to as close to the character’s outline as possible Finally “Crop to content” Blocking out the Head It’s great to have a ruler for measurements Don’t rely on one image if you can If there is only one image of the character in question, lookup the artist and find similar works Have an anatomy page handy www.

Note: Focus on Silhouette! Your character should be identifiable from its silhouette Creating Character Models for 3D Games You need high resolution sculpts You also need low res in game characters What to look for in a high res sculpt How well did you interpret the original concept, or how well did you improve it How clean are your surfaces Did you follow basic design principles How good is your color theory Thing to look for in a low res game character How clean is the edge flow How evenly spaced the topology is Can you create edge flow for deformation How well did you use UV space How nice are the texture maps How They used map resolution to their advantage Are the materials setup properly What to put on one’s portfolio Include 2 or 3 really great characters Quality is king It’s better to have 1 or two great characters than a lot of mediocre ones Using the Cate course to build one’s portfolio Baby Steps Block out a head Then a hand Block out a cartoon character When you’re comfortable enough, block out a human character block out until you’re comfortable with the tools and process Building and Sculpting Build clothing and accessories, sculpt in surface detail like facial features Game Character Creation Phase Create new low res topology Create UVs Bake texture maps Suggest - make a bust only and take it all the way to the end There is a male bust mini-course Character Design Character Realism Spectrum Near the uncanny valley Uncharted Red Dead Redemption More Pixar Like Overwatch Smoother, bolder and simpler color pallets Disney Infinity Even simpler Larger more exaggerated shapes, simpler colors Hard flowing edges that guide one’s eye Ratchet and Clank Even simpler and more exaggerated than Disney Infinity Textures are more detailed Especially in Film, Stylized Character but Realistic Textures Gru from Despicable Me Very stylized character Very detailed clothing textures Mario Bold shapes Non realistic proportions Very few colors covering whole of an object - i.

Background Just a note, this is my first Blender Tutorial! This may be overkill, but one of the things I find tedious to create are windows. They have a surprising number of fiddly details, whether they are old fashioned 1920s single hung windows, or even relatively recent single paned commercial windows with metal trim. What if one could simply define the height, width, and number of panes in the windows? We’re going to accomplish this with geometry nodes.

Blender Version: 4.2 Introduction / Credits I really enjoyed Kent Trammell’s geometry nodes buildings in the CGCookie Cubicity Course, as well as Jonathan Lampel’s dive into Geometry nodes in CGCookie’s Assemble course. This page will use a lot of Kent’s approach to creating buildings, but I’m using it for more realistic structures. With the correct materials the structures could look realistic or cartoony. Planned Plugin Use Aside from some of the standards, like Node Wrangler, I believe the following plugins will be helpful:

Credits: These notes are based off of the Core Tutorials on the CGCookie website. This is the Materials Core class. Instructor: Ewa Wierbik-Ziąbka Notes: The instructor includes a number of downloaded .blend files. I haven’t checked them all out, but several of them seem to go well beyond the basics covered in the course and they’re definitely worth checking out to see how she achieved some of the effects. Simple Shaders Glossy BSDF Creates glossy or metalic surfaces Roughness A roughness 0 creates a perfectly reflective surface Anisotropy 0 is no anisotropy Negative values elongate values along tangent Positive values elongate along normal tangent Rotation 0 is no rotation 1 is 360 rotation Diffuse Shader Only has roughness slider(Fresnel) Light bounces in random directions Emission Emits light Can adjust color and strength Can create whole objects that light up, like Neon, or a glowing Suzanne head When strength is set very high, the light will appear white, while reflections will show the color of the light Transparent Pure white and the object can be completely transparent The darker the color, the less transparent the object is Holdout shader The object is not very transparent, but it asks like a mask Great for compositing If you change the scene background to transparent, it will create an alpha where the object is Mix shader Diffuse and Glossy are a typical combination Except for metal, the color for glossy should typically be white Diffuse is where you set the color, and get a plastic like material Factor controls which shader has a larger effect 0 for Slot A and 1 for Slot B Layer weight This is not a shader, but an Input Plug Fresnel or Facing into the mix shader factor Fresnel Dependent between normal and viewing angle Facing Blends between first and second shader based on viewing angle Add shader If you add two glossy shaders you may end up with reflections that are stronger than the source light This is not accurate This will look strange This is mostly used for emission or volume shaders It is also used to add diffuse and glossy for ceramics Refraction Shader Alone you get dark results near the edges - it almost looks like a toon shader Refraction is often mixed with glossy The sharpness of the refractions is controlled by the roughness of the glossy The amount of light that passes through the object is controlled by the roughness of the refraction shader Color is usually controlled by the refraction shader The glass shader may be more realistic than this combination Translucent Created for thin objects like leaves or paper Often mixed with diffuse With diffuse as the first shader, generally make .

These notes are based off of The Observatory’s YouTube Tutorial. I can’t speak to earlier versions of Blender, but with Blender 3.6 these instructions are no longer needed. The Image Texture supports both Image Sequences and animating the Offset value. One may add an Image Texture Node Choose a numbered range of images Set the Frames to 1 Insert Keyframes for the Offset value to animate the texture. Note: Image Sequence Nodes are no longer available or needed.